21st Century Grammar Handbook (15 page)

Standard English
requires a
hyphen
in any spelled-out fraction that is used as an
adjective
to modify a
noun:
“A two-thirds majority voted for the bill.”

Fragments.
Incomplete
sentences
of any kind are called “fragments.” Generally they should be avoided except on
the rare occasions when they can serve as a
rhetorical
or emphatic device: “This company needs energy. Drive. Imagination” (see
emphasis).

Fragments are not always short bits of sentences. In fact, the most common error with fragments occurs when long
phrases
are linked together but a main
subject, verb,
or
object
is omitted: “In industrial democracies of the sort that have risen over years and through the efforts of imaginative entrepreneurs—the sorts of people who work endless hours and inspire and infuriate others by demanding that they do the same.” This example is full of subjects, verbs, and objects, as well as several complete
clauses.
But there is no main clause with a subject, verb, or object; therefore, this long string of words is nothing more than that: a fragment.

Check all sentences to make sure they are complete even if they are long or complex collections of words. Use length and complexity of a group of words as a reminder that fragments often hide behind long phrases and clauses. Other clues include
colons, dashes,
and
parentheses,
which often are interjected into sentences before a subject has linked up with its verb or object. And since the phrases or clauses contained within the
punctuation
often do have subjects, verbs, and objects, the careless or distracted writer will sometimes lose sight of the fact that the main subject, verb, object connection has been left unmade. Another similar warning sign is a long introductory prepositional, adverbial, or dependent clause, which can also contain subjects, verbs, and objects galore and never lead to a full sentence. The example in the previous paragraph is of this type. See
clause, prepositional phrase,
and
interjection.

Freeze, froze, frozen.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

French.
French
names
of people, works, places, and so on may contain
articles
and special characters
(accents
and letters like a cedilla, “ç”): “
forét
,” “
français
,” “
I’homme.
” Be sure to represent such elements of French as accurately as possible. Consult a French
dictionary
or other source book to explore further details of French, such as
capitalization
and
punctuation.
See
Languages.

From.
Preposition
governing the
objective case:
“The strongest objection came from us.”

Froze.
See
freeze.

Frozen.
See
freeze.

Further.
See
farther.

Future tense.
Verbs
indicate the time of the action they represent by changing form to reflect
tense,
including action in the future: “This explanation will become clear in time.” In most cases the future is signaled by the appearance of the
auxiliary
verbs “will” or
“shall”:
“Shall we dance?” “Shall” is not very common in American usage except in questions like the example just given or in other cases when you want to add
emphasis
to your writing: “We shall overcome.” “Will” is correct in all other instances for
standard English,
although
British English
preserves a distinction in using “shall” and “will” that should be
explored in British
grammar
books by those who will be writing for strictly British
audiences.

Adding other auxiliaries to simple future tenses creates other tenses. Adding
gerunds
(“ing” forms) to “will be” creates a tense called future progressive, used to depict action sustained or ongoing in the future: “I will be going to France.” “I will be staying there six months.” This tense suggests continuing future action or existence.

Combining past
participles
(“ed” forms) with “will have” produces the future perfect, representing actions conceived as completed in the future: “I will have lived in France for the whole summer.”

Finally, gerunds and “will have been” go together to make the future perfect progressive, for actions that end in the future but have some ongoing sense to them: “I will have been traveling to France for four years.” Again, there is a notion of continuation conveyed by this tense, as there is with future progressive.

Each of these combinations is a form of emphasis because it calls attention to a kind of action that has unusual conditions and verb forms attached to it. The names of these tenses are less important than recognizing the utility of the forms made from the future tense.

Gave.
See
give.

Gender.
People, animals, and some objects have gender—they are male and female. Some grammatical elements reflect this natural fact, and others are oddly indifferent to it. Moreover, the pattern of assigning gender to living things and then to words that represent them has left odd traces in English, particularly when English words are somehow related to or derived from non-English ones. Add to this the troubling overidentification of some words with gender, and one arrives at one of the more tangled sides of our language (see
sexist language.).

Despite the complexity of this aspect of English, the consequences for
grammar
and
usage
are relatively slight. Few, if any, English words have gender-specific forms, which means issues of gender
agreement
are few.
Pronouns
have clear genders: masculine and feminine
“he”
and
“she,” “him”
and “her,” “his” and “hers”
(nominative, objective case,
and
possessive,
respectively). And it is relatively easy to match up distinctly male and female beings with the corresponding pronoun: “The bull rams his horns.” “The cow chews her cud.” “The woman writes her novel.” “The man irons his shirt.” “The boy hugs his sister.” But some words for animals or people don’t match a gender. For animal words of this type we can turn to the
neuter
“it”
and
“its”: “The
dog chews its bone.” Of course, if the gender of an animal or plant is known, a gender-specific pronoun can be selected to match: “The dog chewed his bone.” See also
case.

Words that depict human roles, occupations, and so on are trickier. It is clear that mothers are females and fathers are males. But doctors, lawyers, nurses, truck drivers, boxers, and presidents of companies and countries can be either male or female. Thus the sentence “The lawyer checked his notes while the secretary waited for her assignment” assumes gender identifications that might not be accurate and that are certainly stereotypical. Your writing should not assume such gender identifications but should find ways to indicate the possibility of either a female or a male performing the action or occupying the role you are writing about. Use “he or she,” change singular to
plural,
or reconstruct the sentence to get out of the
phrase
that is causing the problem. Whatever solution you find to correct assumed and perhaps biased gender identification, make sure you pay attention to this problem and avoid it in your writing.

English words that have nothing to do with living things also have gender identifications that have persisted from older forms of our language or have been imported with words from other
languages
we now use as though they were English in origin: “The ship sailed at her full speed, but the plane had reduced her rate of descent.” Since these distinctions have their roots in older forms of English or other languages, the genders of the objects tend to fade or become less distinct. Thus it is proper to refer to a ship or
airplane as “it.” Adjust your style to fit your
audience’s
requirements.

Genetive case.
See
possessive.

German.
German has some special characters that need to be represented with care. Several German vowels can have double dots—an umlaut—over them, which distinguishes their pronounced sound: ä, ö, ü; and there is a joined double “s”—f. Umlauted letters are sometimes represented in English with an added “e” instead of the umlaut, and the doubled “s” is sometimes spelled “ss.” It is better to use the
accents
and special character if you can.

Note also that German capitalizes all
nouns
of any kind: “mein Vater, ihrer Mutter, ein Haus” (see capitalization). Check a German grammar, dictionary, or other source book for more details about German
usage, punctuation,
and so on. See
languages.

Gerund.
The
verb
form created by adding “ing” to the root of a verb is called a gerund or present
participle.
(See
conjugation
for the
spelling
and formation rules of gerunds.) It is used to form
tenses
and in a variety of
phrases
and
clauses,
and it can function as a
noun
or
adjective:
“Painting is relaxing.”

As nouns or adjectives, gerunds can play any of the parts that those words can in a
sentence,
including when they are combined into phrases or clauses. “The wilting flower, sitting in a vase on the peeling windowsill, represented declining vigor to the writer, who faced the rapid ebbing of
his talent but was eyeing many cures for his ills.” Here the gerund and present participle play many roles (too many for a single sentence!): Adjective (“wilting,” “peeling,” and “declining”), noun (“ebbing”), and verb form (“sitting” and “was eyeing”).

So versatile a form has many uses, and it happily has few issues of
agreement
to be concerned with. One should, however, pay attention to how the “ing” form functions in a sentence in order to match it with the correct
pronoun
modifying it or related to it
(antecedent).
Since the gerund is a noun form, it requires a
possessive
pronoun to modify it: “The writer improved his typing.” Here “typing” is a gerund and a noun possessed by a male
subject.
Hence the proper possessive pronoun is
“his.”
See
modifier.

Get, got, gotten.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

Give, gave, given.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

Given.
See
give.

Go, went, gone.
An
irregular verb
in its main,
past tense,
and past
participle
forms.

Gone.
See
go.

Good, well.
“Good” is an
adjective
that can only modify
nouns
or refer to them; “well” is an
adverb
that can modify
or refer only to
verbs
(with one exception noted below). Be careful to modify only verbs with “well.” WRONG: “The dog obeys good.” RIGHT: “The dog obeys well.”
“Better”
and
“best” art
both adjectives and adverbs, so they can be applied to either nouns or verbs: “Ferraris are better cars than Porsches, but Rolls Royces run best.” See
modifier.

The modest exception or unexpected
usage
here is when “well” denotes health and “good” appears after the
linking verb “feel”:
“The child is well and feels good.” In this example “well” is an adjective in the
predicate
and modifies “the child,” and “good” plays the same grammatical role—
predicate adjective.
One can also say, “The leader does good” in the sense of performing good acts, but it is wrong to use “good” in this sentence if the meaning is does decently or adequately. In that case it is correct only to say, “The leader does well.”

Got.
See
get.

Gotten.
See
get.

Grammar.
Grammar records currently acceptable
usage
of all words and their forms in the combinations that make up
sentences
and longer statements. It is not immutable; and even though it sometimes seems impenetrable, it is only a way of describing the rules and variations that are in force in our language at whatever level grammar codifies. Most grammars are schoolbooks, and so the standards established are usually those for academic writing or some variant of
“formar”
style
and usage. In business, in private life, in other kinds of writing than formal school prose, we might well apply different standards than are prescribed in academic or formal grammars. Indeed, some industries and organizations have strong views about what they believe correct English is, and they provide their employees or members with guidelines for “proper” writing. Such guidelines are variant grammars.

Which grammar should you follow? Which is right? None. Or at least none all of the time. At various moments, for various reasons, any grammar or set of rules for writing or speaking will be inappropriate, become outmoded, or simply not suit unanticipated needs. Rules written down are fixed, but circumstances change. Our speech and writing change with circumstances, “violating” grammatical rules whenever communication, art, science, or our lives demand a different, fresh, new way to express our thoughts. See
scientific language
and
audience.